The proliferation of electronic communication devices such as laptop computers, tablets, cellular phones, desktop computers, etc. has significantly increased the scale and complexity of computer networks. As the number of devices in networks increase, the task of routing data to and from each of the devices becomes more burdensome. In particular, network complexity can overextend the hardware and software resources responsible for performing network routing.
Many networking platforms utilize modular routing solutions in which the forwarding engine is programmed identically across all of the cards in the different modules. Consequently, the scalability of the network is limited to the table size of a single forwarding engine. In some instances, networks can increase scalability by utilizing techniques associated with virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) and virtual device context (VDC). However, these techniques to improve scalability do not work for all network configurations.